But PELS does expose a few mechanism that can be used for this in flows. E.g the variable “Capacity overhead” contains how much point-in-time power you can spend and still be within budget. E.g “if capacity overhead greater than X, increase the effect”.
I am considering creating a virtual “adapter” device that expose the system capabilities that PELS rely on and that can be used for controlling devices with proprietary capabilities. It would work somewhat similar to the Easy Charge Controller app, but without any scheduling features or anything like that (you can wire those in with flows anyway).
Those EV charger ideas sound awesome, keeping it simple within the power budget limits is all I really «need».
Been using the test version since you posted it, it haven’t been spamming me at all and I’ve stayed within capacity limits so the fixes you pushed worked perfect for me!
There have been some requests on adding price-related flow cards (cheapest hour and things like that). I don’t really want to compete with PBTH and similar apps, but especially if one uses Norwegian price data in PELS, the price info may be more complete than those other apps, so I don’t mind adding some of the more useful cards. Let me know if this is interesting and what your use cases are.
The test version now has some support for EV chargers. It’s behind a toggle in the advanced section for now so that I can release the code itself to Live while it is still being tested by those more adventurous. It is largely based on the Homey charger specs as well as observing what the Easee homey app actually does. If you test this feature, it would be useful for me to receive some diagnostics reports even if the app works as expected. That allows me to write better test cases against different configurations of EV chargers.
Hi, sorry for hijacking.
I have also been testing this for VVB. When you use flow card for disable capacity controll at 6 o’clock in the morning, should then PELS turn off VVB and force it off until you use the enable capacity flow card?
It is not working like that for me, PELS turns it on after a couple of minutes and if I use a flow card after the disable capacity control, VVB turn off. Still PELS turns it back on after like 3 minutes.
It is an Aeotec HD switch, on of and power meter/measure.
When you disable capacity control, PELS will no longer turn a device off. You have to use a second card to do that as soon as you disable capacity control.
PELS should also not turn a device on when capacity management is off. But if you also use price management for the device, setting a new temperature could turn the device back on.
I’ll have a look at what could and could not happen in your case. Also, if you could submit a diagnostics report it could give me an idea of what happens in your case.
PELS did actually turn it on after flow card told to disable capacity control, then a delay and VVB turn off. It happen appx 3 minutes after flow was run. Was a bit busy at that time, so I decided to just wait until I got time to try again. Infact, with some testing now, I can no longer reproduce the failure. So it seems like it’s working fine now There has been a couple of updates after my intial try. Just to clarify, I wanted to control VVB on time with flowcard, since I got “norgespris”.
Just to rule out I sent an diagnostics report: 6abe48dc-168f-41f5-87c7-22955362c6ca
There is one thing that could be happening here: If a device is shed and capacity management is disabled, PELS will restore before it drops the device. If you do an action just after, there may be a race where PELS will actually do the restoration after your “turn off” flow has executed.
I could either ensure that the restoration happens before the disable management card has completed or I could just drop the restoration and it would be up to the flow to ensure the device ends up in desired state.
EV charger features mentioned above are now in the Live version, but still guarded by a toggle under the advanced tab.
A couple of cards related to price: Lowest X hours the next Y hours and a few more handy ones.
Confidence number in the budget tab now reflects how well the home adapts to the budget and price adjustments. Low confidence means you don’t have enough movable load so the home can’t adjust to price, or that the load change too much from day to day so it is hard to create a realistic budget. Note that PELS needs to have been running for at least two weeks for the confidence number to have any meaning.
Thanks. I am aware of that one and will implement support for this as soon as I see a device in the wild that supports it .
That one takes away a few of the true hassles of supporting this now, such as putting the phase shifting responsibility on the EV charger driver rather than having PELS try to figure out conversion between ampere and watt and such. It will be significantly easier to just send target_power in watts.
In addition to the flow card that adds/removes management of a device as a whole, there is now matching flow cards that handles whether a device is subject to soft limits, in particular the daily/hourly budget. This means a device can be exempt from budget, but still subject to the hard cap related to grid tariffs (nettleie). Useful if you want to e.g release a device from budgets in order to ensure one has warm water or a charged battery, but you are not willing to go to the next step on the grid tariffs.
The PELS Insights device no longer provides generated plan and price camera images. If you used those images in dashboards or flows, the budget widget is now the intended replacement. Reason for this is that producing the image increased the memory usage too much often resulting in app crashing.
This release also moves stepped-load devices closer to becoming first-class citizens in PELS. Support for stepped-load control has been expanded and refined so these devices fit better into planning and control, along with a number of smaller stability and UI improvements.
The effect/power support should now be possible with the stepped load feature. For something like an EV charger, one would just set some useful steps based on ones own preferences. This would probably be how to configure EV chargers with PELS once devices start supporting target_power as well. You’d only need less wiring with flows.
Homey finally published the version with the features mentioned above. This is a major version bump for two reasons:
The stepped load functionality deprecates the “Set expected usage for device” flow card.
The “camera” images in the insights app has been replaced with proper widgets. This is because the image generation stack consumed way too much memory. The widget approach is much more efficient and also much more user friendly in my mind. The widget does not require the insights device either.
Also worth mentioning: If you already have configured which HAN/P1-sensor represents teh whole-home energy consumption in Homey Energy, the app can use Homey Energy as a source directly rather than having a flow for this.
Would it be possible to add a checkbox to indicate that the house has a solar panel? So it does not give an error when production exceeds consumption, which causes the AMS to report 0w in usage.
There has been a couple of updates after my intial try. Just to clarify, I wanted to control VVB on time with flowcard, since I got “norgespris”.
